Northern Brewer Auto Siphon

I use siphons from NB. I always siphon Star San through it to work out any problems. I have trouble with it at times but adjust the tubing to fit and it works out. Sometimes I am into the trube? I am trying to not oxygenate the beer while racking into the bottling bucket. NB just resells the siphons made by someone else. Isn't it great to be a home brewer and know almost very one has your back? That has been my experience. Enjoy your beer!

 

I don't think Northern Brewer has their own range of auto-siphons. If you're taking about the plastic auto-siphons, they are sold by multiple vendors, and some people do seem to have issues with them. I have three of them, and have never had an issue.

One thing people have recommended is to put a small amount of starsan (diluted) above the plunger, to aid in a good seal. This assumes your siphon isn't faulty.

 

Boil some water. Allow to cool to the point where you are confident you won't burn yourself. Fill a sanitized liquid measuring cup with sanitized water. Rinse your hands with sanitizer. Hold both ends of a length of sanitized siphon tubing with one hand, so it is u-shaped. Fill the tubing with the water in the cup. Attach one end of the tubing to the racking cane that sits in your fermenter (you can use the autosiphon like a regular cane, without any pumping), carefully keeping a sanitized thumb on the other end. Lower that end into your receiving vessel (bottling bucket). Release your thumb. You have started a gravity siphon.

I used to have problems with autosiphons due to the height that you are required to raise the water in order to fill the tubing to start a gravity feed. You might be able to do it by pumping vigorously, but I broke several autosiphons and decided to use a stainless racking cane, with this approach. You should be able to use the approach with your autosiphon. I recommend getting a stainless cane, though, eventually.

You can probably find a similar video on youtube.

 

To add to @pweis909's post. If you are using a bottle filler at the end of the tubing, Fill a separate container with the water used to start the siphon. Once it starts running beer, start filling as normal.

and/or use a water+starsan mixture to start the siphon. No boiling required.

 

I would not try to fill a bottle from a siphon tube. Bottle fillers work best attached to a bottling bucket. If I did not have a bottling bucket, I would delay bottling until I could get one.

Yeah, you could start the siphon with starsan. It is a small amount, maybe less than 50 mL of already diluted star san solution, getting diluted with your batch of beer. The rationale part of my brain says this is not a problem, but my animal brain thinks sanitizer should not be added to beer.

 

My one and only Fermtech mini-auto-siphon has been in service for over ten years.
It's performed flawlessly more than 50 times each year.

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The connection between the siphon tubing and the auto-siphon needs to be air-tight.

There's no problem getting an air-tight connection when the tubing is new; however...over time the end of the siphon tube becomes deformed from stretching. The fit between the stretched tubing and the auto-sipon is no longer air tight and the suction will either fails completely or allow significant air leakage which in turn oxigenates the flow during the rack.

Solution:
Wrap a course or two of blue painter's tape (BPT) around the upper tip of auto-siphon's plunger end. This will compensate for the increased diameter of the stretched siphon tubing. Adding a course BPT to the tube/plunger connection may be necessary if a tighter seal is needed.

Of course...if this doesn't solve the problem...the batch where the leaky auto-siphon has been tried...should be dumped.

 

If the tip of your tubing gets stretched, just cut the tube off where it's stretched and start fresh, and no need to wrap tape.

 

First of all, bottling from a siphon works just fine. My bucket doesn't have a spigot and this method always works painlessly.

With using starsan I wasn't talking about adding to the beer. Once the siphon starts pulling beer transfer the end of the tubing into your desired vessel. No water or starsan needs to get mixed into the beer.

 

Silly question, when you were attempting to start this siphon, was your primary elevated above your bottling bucket?

 

Fair enough. More than one way to skin a cat. The way I envision yours, it seems awkward, but I must have the wrong impression. Still, I think the bottling bucket has been great for my bottling efforts.

 

PS: what I like about the bucket is that I don't need to hold the siphon tube with the bottle wand; I attach the wand to the spigot and push the bottle up to trigger. I used to try to bottle directly from the siphon tube in the dark ages (pre-1990s), before there were such things as bottling wands. I didn't have a racking cane, either, just plastic tubing. Bottling was frantic because I had no flow control. Messy. Also lost the vacuum frequently and and would have to restart - those were the days of mouth siphoning and bottle infections. This is the sort of chaos I was imagining but apparently it doesn't have to play out this way.

 

That may have successfully moved your beer into a bottling bucket, but you can't say yet that it worked perfectly. Starting the siphon by mouth is a likely source of infection. In the future you should probably practice starting a siphon with water so that you can either gravity start it, or use the auto siphon.

 

I have literally started my siphon every time that way and in over 100 batches of beer never had an infection... Chillax.

 

At least use mouthwash or something, you're just asking for it.

 

Asking for what? The pH of finished beer is not conducive to the growth of nasties. I don't french kiss the friggin thing, but a quick short suck with only the edge touching my lips. How is this substantially different than a person touching it with their hands?